Nik Lentz Hopes Featherweight Debut Proved He’s a New Fighter

Nik
Lentz had heard the criticism. He’d read the articles and the
fan posts saying he was a boring fighter. He also knew his drop to
145 pounds to fight Eiji
Mitsuoka at UFC
150 was his chance to change everyone’s view.

“In my head I knew that I was going to make a statement and I was
going to show the world that I was a new person, that I did all the
things I needed to do and I was one weight class lower,” Lentz told
the Sherdog
Radio Network’s “Beatdown” show. “I felt like everything I did,
all the training and stuff leading up to the fight, worked
out.”

Lentz dominated, stopping Mitsuoka 3:45 into the opening round. The
victory was the culmination of wholesale changes in his
preparation.

“I changed everything in my life as far as diet-wise, conditioning
and training, strength training, all that kind of stuff,” Lentz
said. “I definitely am a 100-percent different person since making
the move to 145 pounds.”

Lentz trained for the bout at
American Top Team in Florida. That’s where he plans on doing
his fight camps from now on, though the Minnesota native will be
training at Minnesota Martial Arts Academy when he’s home.

“I don’t really feel like I left [Minnesota Martial Arts Academy]
behind as much as I just needed some more training opportunities,”
Lentz explained. “There’s definitely nothing wrong with the
training here in Minnesota. The only thing I needed was, I just
needed some different partners. I needed some different looks and
just to talk to people that could give me different views, see
different holes in my game and fix them. I wasn’t getting the job
done. I made a few mistakes that, looking back, I could have easily
fixed. I could have maybe not lost a few fights and stuff like
that, but overall it all kind of worked out to where I just kind of
knew I had to make a life change. I knew that if I wanted to pursue
being a champion in the UFC, if I wanted to pursue this as a
full-time career, like I have for all these years, that I was going
to have to make some big changes and I just did it.”

The decision appears to have paid off. Not only did Lentz deliver
his most impressive UFC performance to date, finishing a fight in
the first round, he also kept his job.

“I had lost the fight before that,” he said. “Anytime you lose a
fight, if you lose two, three fights, you’re looking for a job
somewhere else. Seeing how I’ve invested all my time into fighting,
what am I going to do? Go and apply for a job and say I haven’t had
one in eight years? There’s not much I could do. Once I beat
[Mitsuoka], I was happy and secured in my job. I did it with a
statement and I showed the world that at 145 pounds, people are
going to get messed up by me.”